Tuesday, February 19, 2013

MELROSEandFAIRFAX is NOT on Instagram

Yesterday M&F received an email from a street artist friend who said we had just 'Insta-raped' on Instagram. We were puzzled by what he meant, and he said "Didn't you just join Instagram?"

Nope. MELROSEandFAIRFAX has NOT joined Instagram.

This is just another case of somebody pretending to be M&F. Its happened before. M&F has had numerous bogus profiles started on many social network sites, and even for a short time had an 'impostor' website trying to copy the blog itself. The guise is generally short lived. M&F produces such a tremendous amount of content, that even the fakers and want-to-be-players can't keep up with the real thing.

Followers of M&F will remember our post on #InstagramsSuicideNote, where we pointed out that the new terms of service on Instagram seem incredibly unfair to photographer's since Instagram now owns the rights to any photo that is published, and insidious to users in a bad way since the site plans to use your personal information, and potentially your photos, to market products to your friends and acquaintances. Even though M&F posts a massive amount of content, and does so without watermarking photos, in our opinion there is a big difference between uploading content onto the internet that anyone can use, and a corporate business owning our photos. That is something we are not down with, and it is unlikely that M&F will ever sign up for Instagram.

If there is a silver lining to this story, it seems that the people who are on Instagram have been quite welcoming and happy to hear that M&F is on Instagram (Sorry guys! But thanks for the kind words! Still 'Stay Up!'). The fake 'melroseandfairfax' on Instagram seems to be paying nice with folks--at least so far. But the motives of anyone who pretends to be someone else need to be questioned, and it is puzzling to us why anyone would want to do this?

Who knows why people pretend to be someone else? Maybe the intent is not malicious, and maybe someone is so enamored that they just want to try and pretend to be M&F for a bit. The profile description reads like a backhanded compliment saying that it is the 'Los Angeles premiere street art source' and encouraging folks to follow for the 'best' pics of street art in Los Angeles. That said, however, the 7 photos they uploaded are from years ago and not a good sampling of what M&F does on the streets. Also, we would never put an 'e' at the end of premier. But perhaps the funniest thing to us is the location of the squiggly mark. The fake user put it before ~Get up stay up. This feels so strange to M&F, almost like an upside down cross is sacrilege. The reason that we put it at the end of a statement is that it seems to carry the energy of what was said forward. So when we write, 'Get Up, Stay Up!~', the squiggly mark implies that the thought keeps on going. To put it before the words defeats the purpose entirely. Don't settle for an impostor they don't understand the nuances of the dance. The only place to get the real deal is here, on MELROSEandFAIRFAX.~

As far as social media goes, M&F does have a passive Facebook page, and a Twitter account. But both of those are just token accounts, and the only place to catch MELROSEandFAIRFAX is right here online.